Crises present extraordinary challenges for political leaders. Amid threats, uncertainty and urgency, they must undertake a number of tasks, such as making sense of what is going on and articulating its depth and scope to a wider public. I would argue, however, that such tasks are means towards ends, rather than ends in themselves. The goal of leaders is to successfully manage a crisis. After all, who would want to fail, except as an interim measure towards a longer-term success? The focus of this book is ‘framing’ and therefore we need to ask: if leaders strive to produce frames in order to successfully manage a crisis then what does a ‘successful’ frame look like from their perspective? The clues are already in Chapters 1 and 2, but I want to draw them out:

Of course, it is not possible to get inside the minds of leaders to prove these assumptions. Even interviews have limitations. A large element of crisis leadership is based on instinct rather than a rational appraisal of objectives and all the possible means of achieving them (Flin 1996). Nevertheless, it is a relatively straightforward task to look at the global financial crisis case studies and attribute, with a high degree of plausibility, ‘success’ motives. For example, in terms of the political game, the initial ‘business-as-usual’ frame (type-1) of Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, could be read as an attempt to play down the crisis, while playing up his credentials as an experienced economist who was strongly placed to lead the country at the forthcoming election. This frame suited his quest to hold onto office and enhance his reputation. With regard to the policy game, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark’s framing of the crisis as both threat and opportunity (type-2 and type-3) can be read as an attempt to pave the way for policy reform. The fact that an election was looming illustrates that a striving for political success can be contingent on policy success—in this case, the need to demonstrate that the existing Labour-led government was best placed to manage the global financial crisis.

Importantly, no frame is guaranteed to succeed. Some strategies are riskier than others. Risks relate to the likelihood that goals will not be met (Drennan and McConnell 2007). Context is crucial to assessments of risk (Douglas 1992; Althaus 2008). The same activity—walking slowly across the road—is low or even no risk when the road is empty, but high risk if done on a busy motorway. Leadership framing of crisis is little different. A frame can be at low risk of failing to achieve ‘success’ in one context, but that same frame can be high risk in another. We need to think, therefore, about ‘context’.

Context can be all manner of phenomena such as culture, time, political mood and economic activity. For the purposes of focusing on framing, I consider context to be the existence or otherwise of strong and credible counter-frames to those articulated by leaders.

If leaders strive for political success by projecting a frame that is intended to ensure their political survival and protect and even enhance their reputation then—all things being equal—a lower risk context is when there is no strong and credible counter-frame in existence. Clearly, this is typically the case in the early sense-making and meaning-making stages of a crisis when leaders need to be out in the public sphere with statements on issues of crisis severity, causes, responsibilities and remedies. Many of the chapters in this volume reveal early attempts to exogenise the global financial crisis and play down its severity (for example, in Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland), although such frames can survive intact for long periods when there is no credible opposition to produce authoritative counter-frames (for example, in Singapore and to a large extent Canada). When the context is different, however, these same framing strategies can become barriers to political success. It seems clear, for example, that former US President George W. Bush’s initial business-as-usual response (playing down the crisis as little more than a market correction) was understandable in terms of his low popularity and a desire to protect his political capital. With corporate failures and increasingly worse economic indicators leading to credible counter-frames, however, his framing became a barrier to achieving his political goals—for example, ending his term in office on a relative ‘high’ in terms of job approval. His conversion to a type-2 ‘crisis as threat’ frame was a logical move if he was to have any hope of protecting his political reputation and avoiding the label of being chronically ‘out of touch’ with every major crisis in the United States after 9/11.

A similar logic applies to contexts, risk and the policy game. If leaders strive for policy success by seeking to steer policy down their desired route (stability, reform or a combination) then—all things being equal—a lower risk context is when there is no strong and credible counter-frame. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and Chancellor, Alistair Darling, adopted a type-2 ‘crisis as critical, global threat’ frame, a move that was suited to conserving the British policy status quo and, in the political game, circumnavigating questions of the 11-year-old Labour Government’s co-responsibility for the occurrence of the crisis. A type-2 frame on its own does not, however, provide the legitimating framework when strong counter-frames are emerging from opponents and the media that policy reforms are needed to tackle a crisis. With the Conservative Party ascendant in the polls—though not necessarily pushing a radically different and more popular line on the financial crisis—and the media sceptical towards the government, the move of Brown and Darling to a type-3 frame becomes understandable. They started presenting the crisis more explicitly as a trigger for regulatory reform. A quest for policy success seems evident in both phases, but frames need to be aligned with goals, otherwise risks of failure are generated.

One might be led to believe, therefore, that crisis framing is a simple task. All that leaders need to do is think about what they want, assess the strength of and support for counter-frames and then opt for the lowest-risk framing strategy with the highest likelihood of political and policy ‘success’. As I will explain below, however, leadership is never simple and crisis leadership is doubly complicated.